The Destructive Flood: The Crash of the HD

This is another geek-post about how I do my work as a PhD student . . .

In order to farm in the arid world of ancient Mesopotamia, the Tigris and Euphrates rivers were used for irrigation. When the rivers overflowed, crops (and, by extension, lives) were destroyed. I've been thinking a lot about the work that goes into farming (thanks to Jayber Crow).

I'm a PhD student, which means that my work doesn't go into maintaining the life-sustaining farm, but it goes into bits and bytes. (A buddy and I have explored this metaphor: if we treat our "work" like farming, we find that we are more faithful to "work hard"––up before the sun, stopping for meals, but then getting right back to it . . . )

My destructive flood? The hard drive crash.

I'm careful that the most important stuff makes it into my dropbox folder, but I still can't afford put everything there.

But what about everything else? As a Mac user, I've always wanted to use Time Machine but I wasn't sure the best way to do it. My external HD isn't big enough for everything that I need it for––especially when Time Machine is included in "everything."

So, I decided to add a second, 1 TB hard drive to my MacBook.
(Other options: replace the stock HD with a SDD which are better. Or, if really pressed for virtual space, one could replace the stock HD (mine is 320GB) with another 1 TB or bigger . . . but who has that much stuff?)

So, I gutted the SuperDrive (MacBook's DVD drive, mine only sporadically worked, anyway) and replaced it with the 1TB HD.

Supplies:
-An external DVD drive at $30 (which I bought a while back because SuperDrive wasn't so super and we NEEDED to play Thomas the Train DVDs in a bad way)
-A holder for a HD at $8 (It even comes with a little screwdriver!)
-An external HD (I bought this one because of it's size to price ratio; at that time it was on sale for $60.)
-Grand total = $100 for 1,000 gigs. Not too shabby.

Then, I watched a few YouTube videos (like here) about the process, which is really simple.

Install according to the videos.

Set up the HD. (I partitioned mine at 600GB and 400GB; my iPhoto library is on one partition.)

Set up Time Machine.

Then, voila. Time Machine backs up on the hour. Every hour. No matter where I am.


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In addition, I use my external HD as another Time Machine backup. Pretty cool.

Also, I've noticed that the second HD does decrease the battery at a faster rate.